The single travel token

The emergence of single travel token over the next few years is probably the most exciting development for passengers hoping to fast track through the airport. This could eliminate the need for multiple travel documents without passengers having to share their personal data.

SITA Lab is researching how using virtual or digital passports in the form of a single secure token on mobile and wearable devices could reduce complexity, cost and liability around document checks during the passenger journey.

SITA’s innovative research imagines passengers creating a verifiable ‘token’ on their mobile phone which contains biometric and other personal data. In this vision of future travel, no matter where in the world you go any authority can simply scan your face and scan your device to verify you are an authorized traveler. This can be done without all these agencies ever controlling or storing your biometric details.

In an early demo of these concepts, SITA Lab are using blockchain technology which allows ‘privacy by design’ so that passenger data can be secure, encrypted, tamper-proof and unusable for any other purpose. At the same time, blockchain technology eliminates the need for a single authority to own, process or store the data. The crypto-led computer science of blockchain provides a network of trust, where the source and history of the data is verifiable by everyone.